Family Saturday: Tease Your Brain at the Museum of Illusions

My kids aren’t allowed to have Instagram accounts, and my wife and I are not big ’gram users. Mainly because I look awful in selfies. So none of us have had much interest in the recent spate of pop-up “museums”—Dream Machine, Color Factory, Rosé Mansion, Room for Tea, Candytopia, the Egg House, the Pint Shop, the Toilet Plunge (just kidding on that last one, but who knows what will come next?)—designed for the sole purpose of snapping highly shareable photos.

Photo by Carolina Ramirez

Until this weekend. We’ll be visiting the Museum of Illusions ($19 for adults; $15 for kids 6–13; free for kids 5 and younger), a new “intriguing visual, sensory, and educational experience” that opened in late September in Chelsea. I’m usually wary of events and places described as “experiences,” but several of my colleagues have visited the MOI and assured me that, although there are enough photo ops to please the ’grammers, the museum is a lot smarter than your typical pop-up. In fact, it may not be a pop-up at all. The owners leased the space for 15 years and have long-term ambitions for their collection of brainteasers and optical illusions. So while you can take a funky photo that looks like your head is on a platter—and I have to admit, this sounds right up my kids’ alley—and one where you’re playing poker with five versions of yourself thanks to some well-placed mirrors, you can also solve puzzles, figure out the tricks behind common illusions, and learn how and why your brain plays tricks on you.

Photo by Carolina Ramirez

Our smart and sophisticated partnerships associate, Carolina Ramirez, and her boyfriend (they’re the adorable guy and gal in the photos) had so much fun there that she says they “laugh cried.” So we’ll give it a shot. Besides, who am I kidding? I’ve dragged my kids to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the New-York Historical Society (I’ll never understand that hyphen), the Brooklyn Museum, and the American Museum of Natural History, and yet their favorite museum of all time remains Ripley’s Believe It or Not!.